meinlessmatters: Train Nerds

A few Christmas' ago, I came across a set of Lionel trains that had belonged to my mom when she was a kid. They were Lionel O Gauge and the set was really cool and old. So I decided to give the set to Mike as a Christmas gift. He always talked about having trains as a kid and how much fun he and his brother had designing the layouts. So he got this train set, and within 3 months we had built a 22' x 8' train layout. We actually sold our pool table and ping pong table to make room for this in our basement.

The theme came from the first building I made out of popsicle sticks. It was called the Big Bear Lodge. So because this building was so cool, we decided to make the layout a mountain scene in South Dakota or Colorado. My husband almost nixed the Big Bear Lodge off of the table, because as my first hand made building (I actually made most of the buildings and scenery on this table) was totally out of scale. But because it meant so much to me, we kept the Lodge . (If we hadnt, I would of totally washed my hands of being involved in this project).

All of the buildings had names like Meiners Mine, Little Gay Johnnie's Garden Stand, The Dew Drop Inn, Spear Fish Tackle Shop etc. I actually made most of these houses out of Jiffy Corn Bread boxes, Brownie Mix boxes, shoe boxes etc. and covered them with popcicle sticks, then stained or painted them. I used images off of the internet to get the graphics for the signage.

We spent virtually all of our spare time for 3 months working on this set. Mike was the engineer, building the tables, designing the track layout and figuring out the electrical and controls. I was the "set" designer and I think we would of won an Academy Award for set design on this project. We would spend hours in train stores and we actually ended up buying two more engines and passenger and coal cars.. . We had three different trains running at one time intertwining through four large mountains (made out of chicken wire and paper mache). We had bridges, lakes and streams. We actually had a waterfall that I made that took hours using a glue gun to make it look like real water falling from the mountain. We had a ski lodge and a ski mountain, lumber mill, an ice skating rink, a VFW hall, Post Office, and a downtown business district.

Our highschool kids would come home and just laugh at us. We were like the two biggest train nerds. At night, I would find Mike downstairs with a cocktail standing at the control panel, just watching the trains go round and round and sounding the whistles. I even went as far as to buy him a little Conductor hat, but he refused to wear it. We had alot of fun with this project. But when we moved, we dismantled it and I sold all the buildings on Craigslist.

New train room under construction

Not to worry, the new train set will be reerected soon. Mike already has built a new table and we have actually built it in a spare room we have in the basement. This will be cool because I can paint the walls the color of the sky or pitch black and we can put christmas lights up to look like stars. Not sure what the new theme will be, but I am leaning towards either a desert theme or Mizzou college town theme complete with a football field.